by Travis Mateer
Are you looking at FREE SPEECH art or shitty propaganda? The Missoulian will tell you the art show these red, white and blue fortune cookies are a part of is all about FREE SPEECH, but is it?
When Leslie Van Stavern Millar was growing up, her family moved around with her father’s job as an oil company executive, including time living in Iran and Libya. After Moammar Gadhafi rose to power in the latter in 1969, they returned to the U.S. While leaving, Millar, then a college student, had packed some of her artworks. Security personnel at the airport smashed them.
“Unconsciously, that has always sort of been in the background with me — like you could lose this, this could happen,” she said.
While an extreme outlier, the memory lingers with her as an example of the importance of our rights under a democracy and freedom of expression, the subject of a group art exhibition she’s curated along with some accompanying talks.
Yes, meanies in other countries aren’t always supporters of the arts, but thankfully Leslie Van Stavern Millar is an AMERICAN where artists are free to create AMAZING WORKS OF ART like this:
This piece is impressive. Not only is it UGLY AS FUCK, I also feel stupider for having looked at it. Is it the artist’s intent to create a parody of political art so ugly and politically obvious as to inspire revulsion and disgust? If so then BRAVO!
Another piece shows a book burning that’s NOT about burning quality literature, but selectively burning the patriarchy. I’m so glad the artist used words to make this fine distinction (emphasis mine):
Millar included a two-part piece from her now decade-long “Burnt Offerings” series. A female figure is seen reading a book, near a pyre that has a stack of books. (She clarified that it’s burning a patriarchal past rather than literature.) She sculpted a small “bonfire” from sticks dipped in white that rests on a small shelf at the base.
Another one of these pieces of free speech art has the struggle against misogyny as its message. I’m glad we have such smart women to explain this art to the stupids who might start thinking there’s a political agenda afoot here (emphasis mine):
Among the pieces that are less direct is Stephanie Frostad’s graphite and oil painting, “Against the Current III.” A woman is waist-deep in water, carefully looking downward as she proceeds ahead, her steps as deliberate as Frostad’s, a classically trained painter. In her statement, she writes that “while the water’s force may represent a host of challenges, it also symbolizes the tide of misogyny washing through our culture and politics today. Around the world, women continue to struggle for bodily autonomy, access to health care, education and economic opportunities.”
I think it’s time to drop a little factoid that might be a controversial thing to say, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Here it is: every violent male serial killer throughout history HAD A MOTHER. Fact. Unless there’s evidence that any of our famous male serial killers were grown in a test-tube, I think it’s fascinating to think about this fact as a contrast to this article about FREE SPEECH art that sounds suspiciously like a celebration of politically motivated misandry.
The Missoulian paired this “art” article with an op-ed from Mary Sheeehy Moe lamenting how all the poor women out there are considered “just a rib” by those stupid Christians.
From the link:
Misogyny. Miss-AW-jenny. Just when you think the second-class status of women is a thing of the past, misogyny rears its ugly head.
Just when you think the second-class status of women is a thing of the past, misogyny rears its ugly head.
It’s always amazed me that it took women in this country half a century longer than Black men to get the vote. (It took Indigenous Americans even longer.) The Equal Rights Amendment, first advanced in 1923, finally died on the vine in 1982, three state ratifications short of the promised land. And 1971’s Roe v. Wade, recognizing a woman’s right to make decisions abut her own body, lasted a mere half-century before becoming the first Constitutional right to be rescinded.
And now, misogyny fills the air. A candidate for president unapologetically calls his female opponent “dumb as a rock.” (As last week’s debate demonstrated big time, rocks can be pretty dang smart.)
A candidate for vice president makes comment after comment demonstrating that, in his view, a woman’s value is measured by the children she bears and raises.
This is definitely an outdated mode of thinking. To modernize this sentiment, here’s what I think our culture is saying these days: a woman’s value is measured by the victimhood status she can leverage. Who cares if shitty art and shitty political candidates are the result? Certainly not professional victims who strongly believe society owes them something.
The idea that anything resembling “free speech” even exists these days is funny to me, because it doesn’t. The censorship of cancel culture is constantly looking for new offenders to silence, further insulating the cognitive prisoners of WOKE from the reality that, just maybe, their political Queen REALLY IS DUMB AS A ROCK.
If a politically unpopular woman who couldn’t win the nomination outright and spits out garbled word salads regularly after propping up a senile white man as President for 4 years ascends, the only response to criticism will be to yell MISOGYNY as loudly and repeatedly as necessary before tossing the critics in the WOKE gulag for their terrible thought crimes.
Ok, that’s all for this week. Next week I’ll continue screaming into the retarded void, so stay tuned, and drop me some dollars at Travis’ Impact Fund (TIF) if you can afford it.
Thanks for reading!
